As a former owner of an op-1 and a current owner of a PO35 and a PO32, I’d say the OPZ looks more like the natural progression of the Pocket Ops (as opposed to OP1 rev 2) as sort of a mega pocket operator, which is a good thing imo. That intuitiveness/versatility of the two Sonic Charge collabs specifically (Speak and Tonic) really give me high hopes for the OPZ. From all of the demo’s from the beta testers I’ve seen, it looks like the experience will be quite similar to the Pocket Ops in that they are kind of hard to describe but make a lot of logical sense once you actually start playing one.

There was a rumour of updated op1 firmware to play nicer with opz but I wouldn’t assume it’s real until it’s downloadable.
As very few are out in the wild the more specific questions are unlikely to be easy to answer yet.

great to see OPZ finally arrived. I really hope they will do fine, TE is such a cool company and OPZ seems to be a labor of love. I probably will pick one up later this year but not before @cuckoomusic is (hopefully) doing a nice walkthrough

It’s interesting that the yellow CV module that was posted above was labeled ‘oplab’.

Glad I still have an original Oplab, which I’ve recently begun to use again… as an USB host.

I may be interpreting things wrong but when I thought of OP-Z ‘modules’ I imagined them to be software, not physical. So this is pretty exciting. It also reveals certain blind spots in my own imagination. TE is good at doing that with their designs.

That’s true, but it’s also a lot more expensive than an Electribe 2 Sampler, for example.

I think a lot of the appeal in this is the novelty, the form factor, the design, the workflow, the expansion possibilities, etc. From first impressions it doesn’t seem to have the magic of the OP-1 for me, though. I don’t find it as interesting a synthesizer. The OP-1 is a great sound design machine. Just MHO. Infinite respect to TE though.

TE’s marketing has been “organic” style, through YouTubers and info-leaks, which I think has been pretty effective at getting it nice and hyped. There is more than one in-depth walkthrough of the thing on YT if you want to see it before ordering it.

I think a lot of the appeal in this is the novelty, the form factor, the design, the workflow, the expansion possibilities, etc

Yes the portability is a big deal here, fortunately it seems that quite a few manufacturers are making fairly portable ‘compose anywhere’ gear now, currently TE and Synthstrom are leading the field here, offering fairly complete ‘workstations’ that are small enough AND have decent battery life AND can be integrated into a studio/larger setup when needed.

I know a lot of people hate small gear (I’m sure Freud would have something to say about this ) but plenty of people seem to like it, and there are more than enough full size, power hungry, behemoth synths out there for those who need them, so it is nice to see modern, small, great sounding and powerful instruments becoming more common IMHO.